Category: Work & Freelancing

I just got back from Quebec City where I attended my first Boreal convention. Boreal is a French language literary convention with a focus on science-fiction, fantasy and other speculative genres. It has hopped about to different cities in Quebec, but this year it was in Quebec City.

Weirdly enough, due to my heavy networking on English language forums and attendance of events like Illuxcon and the IMC, most of my art and publishing contacts are American, or at least, not Quebecers. We have a thriving local industry and I wanted to learn more so I signed up! I also volunteered to take part in the programming and I ended up participating in three panels.

There is a side of me who feels like a fraud whenever I’m put in a position like that, but I manage to rationalize it. It turns out I had a ball. I really enjoyed myself and I was lucky to have fantastic co-panelists. One of the subjects was touchy (the one about misogyny) but I felt that there was respect all around, both at the panel table and in the audience. I also got to see Christian Sauvé’s conference about being a critic and a variety of panels, I visited the exhibitors room and met great people. I also had two original paintings with me, one of them being a cover for Solaris winter 2014, so I was told be a lot of people that they had recognized it, which always feels good, the other one was Un Bon Cygne.

It’s a fairly small scene but a lot of my fellow con-goers and all the staff and volunteers went out of their way to make me feel welcome.

As usual, my tips for anyone thinking of going to a small to medium-sized convention are the same:

Do it.

Wear your name tag, make sure it’s visible.

Bring a portfolio and business cards, take them everywhere with you.

Don’t be afraid to approach people and introduce yourself.

When it’s lunchtime and a lot of people are milling about, it’s ok to ask perfect strangers if you can join them. Eating with someone is a great way to get to know them.

In the illustration field like in the video game field, sometimes you work on something and then you just can’t show it to anyone. And then when you CAN show it, it feels like what you are doing now is completely different. This happened with this cover. It’s not that old, I only did it in September/October 2013, but I feel that I already work differently now.

Solaris is the oldest French language genre fiction magazine in existence. I was commissioned to do a cover by Joël Champetier, the editor in chief. His direction was basically: “We like both your digital and traditional stuff, pitch us something that doesn’t have tentacles.” Yep, that open ended. So I did tons of thumbnails in my sketchbook and I picked 6 of them to clean up and send. 3 that I would paint digitally and 3 that I would paint in acrylics.

The thumbnails I sent Mr.Champetier. The brown ones are for traditional paintings and the black and white are for digital paintings. The gentleman with the the suit would have been a portrait of Dr.Penfield with a humonculus on his back, it was supposed to be a kind of neurology/fantasy mashup.

Joël picked the guy with the jet pack. He said that in all of Solaris’ years, he didn’t think they ever had a jet pack on the cover, as cliché as they can be. With that, I started working on cool jet pack and outfit designs. I was going for a diesel punk look, but I didn’t want him to look too much like the Rocketeer, he was from the same era, but he was a different guy from a grittier world.

The references I used to make my final drawing. Actually, I used more than that. I used a few pictures of Matthieu for different details and I used images I found around the internet for things like brass fittings, jet contrails, jet packs, ancient outfits.

Armed with my approved thumbnail and my jet pack and outfit design, I asked my friend Matthieu Legault to model for the character. Matthieu is a writer with 7 published novels under his belt but I think it’s the first time he’s on the cover of one. He had a sweater that somewhat looked like the jacket in my outfit and I had a big packpack, goggles and goth boots so that’s the extend of his costume. We tried all kinds of poses, in my yard and in my kitchen, but in the end, the stool was the best way to make him look like he’s flying. Otherwise he just looked like a guy standing on one foot. I also modeled the basic jet pack shapes and stucked them on a mannequin to get the angles of the wings and rockets right on Matthieu and the shadows.

This is the design of the jet pack that I decided to go with. In the end, my model had hair that fit exactly the period I was going for, so I decided to use that instead of a helmet. I also included the progression of the drawing I did from the references.

I choose amongst the pictures the ones that were the most dynamic and looked the most like someone flying. It’s not exactly like the thumb, but it’s an improvement. I went through several rounds of refining the drawing and several possible designs for the contrail. The line art with the smoke swirls is what I sent the client for approval.

This is the drawing that I used as reference when painting. All of the value problems have been solved.

When it was approved, I rendered the values in Photoshop so that I wouldn’t have to make decision in paint. I didn’t render the birds because the plan was to have them just be silhouettes in varnish on unvarnished MDF. They would be very subtle and translucent to make them look far away.

The transfer of the image on the MDF panel.

I printed my line art in 3 different parts that I assembled and then rubbed the back of the drawing with Conté crayon, white for the smoke and sienna for the character and birds. I then clipped/tapped it to the board and traced all the line. The result is a bit messy and dark but I wipe it lightly with a dry paint rag and it gets much better.

You can see the first 3 steps of the painting phase. I started with the graphic elements because they help me establish what the lightest value is going to be. Then I get started with the darkest darks. I don’t really do big washes because I try to avoid sealing in the conte powder under nearly transparent layers where they will remain visible. I erase a lot of the lines as I go. Also, if I put too much paint somewhere, I have to wipe it off very fast or else I will have to sand it off, I can’t paint in white on top of dark or vice versa.

Some people are surprised to learn that the painting stage is often shorter than the design stages. All the hard decisions have been made and all I have to do now is slap paint around and not screw up. The new screwing up part might be easier if I worked in oil. It’s in my plans, but right now I still work in acrylics. For this painting I used only two colors, raw umber and unbleached titanium. I am a very big fan of unbleached titanium, it’s quite light, but not dead or blinding like white. It fits well with the sepia style I’m going for at the moment. I the past, I have painted plenty of pieces on raw unprimed and unvarnished masonite and MDF but this was a different type of MDF that I had gotten at the hardware store, not at the art supply store and it was soft, like suede and the paint didn’t glide so well on it. I had bought a big piece and had it cut into several panels, so for my following pieces, I gave a few coats of gloss medium on the MDF before transferring the drawing. It works much better for me.

This is the finished and retouched painting. I have removed tiny flecks in the MDF, added a bit of smoke, removed a bird and did various retouching of the character.

When I was done, I varnished the piece, only on the the already painted parts so the rest is raw and matte. Then I took a good picture and sent it to Joël. He wanted the contrail to end closer to the rocket, so I changed that in Photoshop and did some other touch ups. Then I sent him the high-resolution file.

I just finished putting together a catalogue of all the paintings I have for sale, and also a few who are already sold. I’ve wanted to sell art outside of shows for a while, but it’s pretty hard if I don’t have a list of the art available anywhere. So here it is. It’s pretty much a work in progress, I will be updating as new pieces are added and as pieces sell. I also have a section on commission because a lot of people don’t know that it’s possible to order a painting to their specifications.

The Holidays are coming, so it’s time to buy or order art, whether you want to give it away or just to brag to your visitors!

Like this:

I just had a fantastic meeting today with Suzanne and Julia, two other Drink & Draw Montréal contributors. We talked about the future of the site and I mentioned that I didn’t post very often because each of my post is such a laborious process that it takes ages to come to fruition and involves much procrastination and stalling. I have known that I was stalling for a long time, but the discussion we had validated my feelings (and my choice of topics) and I decided to write smaller articles more often and it would increase my output.

Of course, I didn’t come up with that idea. That’s where the expression Baby Steps comes from. The thing is, often we don’t notice how much we are stalling while we are stalling. We are procrastinating because a task seems too arduous and it’s just easier and less scary to do something else. It’s the reason you hear about people trying to do a novel, but never finishing it, but you rarely hear about people trying to do a short story but never finishing it. It’s much easier to do a short story, so chances are you will finish, even if it’s rubbish.

The same can be said of anything, making art, packing for a move, doing our taxes. It seems so big and complicated that we push it back and never do it. I have been doing that with my writing for DnD. But our meeting gave me plenty of ideas of articles that shouldn’t be agony to write, so expect more in the near future. And we are planning on putting the drinking back into Drink and Draw, so expect more of that as well!

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Back in January I started writing a series of articles for DrinkAndDrawMTL.com titled Petit guide de Survie pour Artiste (Small Survival Guide for Artists) because I thought resources about art were not as plentiful in French as they were in English, and there wasn’t that much specifically about Québec. D&DMtl was derived from the loose networks of artist gatherings around the world where artists meet to socialize and draw. It so happens that in Montreal, people don’t gather to draw anymore, but the blog survived and has a sort of webzine format. I thought it was a great platform for me to work on informing artists and art hopefuls.

Like this:

Recently, Gurney Journey and Muddy Colors had features on art books and a lot of people seem to be curious about art book collections. I’m in the process of packing to move and I thought I could take a few pictures of my art books since they were all in the same place for once. I don’t have a very big collection, but I’m aiming for voluntary simplicity in books. I also suspect I move way more often than the people with the book hoarding thing going on.

Mah books

Often when I see pictures of bookshelves I end up thinking to myself:”Well, cool. but I can’t make out what all these books are at that scale.” So I thought I would list the looks, or at least, most of them. I think it’s going to motivate me to write all the book reviews I’ve wanted to write, and crosslink them to the picture. Some of them are not exactly art books, they are reference books, picture books or books by artist friends.

1

The GAG Pricing and Ethical Guidelines

Book of the Five Rings, got neat prints of samurai.

Dover Victorian Design

Peck – Atlas of Human anatomy for the artist

Molly Bang – Picture This

Steve Prescott- Aggregate

Textbooks from my costume history classes.

WotC- The art of the Rath cycle.

The making of Alien Resurrection

Will Eisner- Graphic storytelling and visual narrative

L’harmonie des couleurs sur le web (basically tons of palette samples for website, useful for quick and dirty graphic design jobs or to get a client to pick something)

Ken Hultgren – L’art de dessiner les animaux.

PML- René Lalique

The Spiderwick field guide

De Fontenoy à Waterloo (book on european military uniforms in the 1800’s)

Uniformes Militaires. Book on various military uniforms I picked up in a bazaar.

Donato Giancola’s Middle Earth book

Juliette Aristides – Classical Drawing Atelier

Peck- In the Studios of Paris, William Bouguereau and his American students.

Loomis- Figure Drawing for all it’s worth.

2

Alex Wreck- Stolen Sharpie Revolution

DiTerlizzi and Black -The first volume of Spiderwick

Strunk & White- The Elements of Style (not an art book, but I think everyone who needs to communicate in writing needs to read it)